On 11/26/2017 7:16 PM, jbeattie wrote:
I'm not tied to Portland and expect to leave one day, but I'm not moving to some **** hole with supposed right-thinking people. Washington is income tax free. Live in White Salmon and ski/ride on Hood. http://www.blainefranger.com/blog/up..._HoodRiver.jpg
PDX is an hour away, and I can cross the bridge and hang-out with the hipsters in Hood River. And PDX is an hour away so my wife and I can travel to some place warm when it gets dreary.

About where to live - a true story:

When my daughter and her husband still lived in Portland, we'd visit a
couple times per year. Portland is a really interesting city. And
Portland's bike shops outnumber ours hundreds to one. Some of them carry
some stuff that's very hard to find around here.

So on one trip, I went into Citybikes (that den of tattooed socialism)
because they actually had a Shimano dynamo hub in stock. As I was paying
for it, I told the fetchingly tattooed cashier girl "I hope the TSA lets
me take this thing on the plane. A metal cylinder with wires dangling
from it may look suspicious." She asked "Where are you flying to?" so I
answered "Ohio."

Her response was wistful jealousy! "Oh, Ohio! My brother goes to college
in Ohio and he LOVES it! He says it's so green and pretty, and it
doesn't rain all winter! He talks about it all the time! I wish I could
move to Ohio!"

And indeed, at dinner tonight with two other couples, we were all saying
how much we love living here. Housing prices and other living expenses
are very low, we're just outside of a small city with unusual cultural
amenities for its size, we're about an hour from any of three larger
cities with even more to offer, and at least for my style of riding, the
bicycling is great.

To explain that latter point: Our little city is old enough to have
primarily a grid pattern. That means if one arterial is unpleasant, I
can choose to ride the residential collector one block over. It's like
an organically grown bike boulevard. And once I ride out of the suburbs
(maybe three miles if that) I'm on a dense network of little country
roads. See, Ohio was settled by farmers, some of the first frontier
settlers. They needed roads to get to each little farm, so there are
lots of low-traffic roads in a rough grid with spacing of about a mile.
There are endless choices for exploring.

And I happen to live within a couple miles of where the glaciers
stopped. That means if I want relatively flat rides, I head north or
west. If I want punishing hills, I head east or south - although I
choose that option less frequently these days.

Finally, I'm in an area known as the Connecticut Western Reserve, which
was originally chartered to Connecticut. Connecticut chose to sell it
off to its state residents before control of the territory was ceded to
the brand new Federal Government. Many of those early settlers brought
along their love for quaint little villages, charming New England
architecture, and village greens with gazebos and such. In rural areas
those old villages are spaced nicely - not too close, but not too far. A
day's bike ride can pass through ten of them, each with handy support
facilities.

When my wife, my daughter and I rode coast to coast, we saw lots and
lots of different types of countryside, different towns and cities. It
confirmed in my mind that this is the area where I want to live.

--
- Frank Krygowski